Tour Guide When he was a boy in Beit She’an, years before these later excavations, one standing column marked the mud alone of its fallen cardo to play goalpost. That was the hinge in time. After rains, rough disks, greens of gray and crusted image, would surface where he kicked, coins to pay passage to this now cleared lot where the man stands, certified to guide us on the steel mesh platforms just above that level of the past, spot-lit, on which we may look down turning from the edge of too large an idea. It’s restful there. But back to the speaker’s face, to news of figures crowning from dried mud, ready to brush and rebury in air. Thick, bellow, are the bones that made them. This commemoration, slick enough to spin the simulacrum of a day, each sliver teeming with yet finer angles, is not its only crossroads, just a place to saunter through sometime, one origin, rubble-shielded, never fully conquered but labeled with the current explanations. We walk the dry line of an ancient street pointing tell to town. Along the sides restored capitals decorate the dust. We stir up nothing with our ghostly feet. Cities of David I took no notes or photos, only went slip-soled on worn cobbles, passed through gaps, stone-dust cat footing among bronze-age base-blocks and tourist platforms. Bottle-cap medallions, fool’s gold among wrappers, fill the edges of street on older street, city in city ringing outward. Even the hill of dead has its suburbs; moving on further, cinematheque perches on the lip of hell speaking ghosts, then credits caught on screen in chips and splinters, fragments too small for writing. A segment of stroke flits, a split iota goes pouring out its power past a center devoid of relic, spark in the chain of impressions not all lost: each fire-hardened seal full of dreams like a pomegranate, tart and tangled, charged prophecy multiply beyond its ashes, blown with other dust in all directions far and back, landing here enriched and rooting, breaking through the rock, the heart sprouting forth a ladder made of angels slippery as dust, certain as light— the only new thing. Beneath a tree tiny fallen eggs empty to air: their difference in the past, their edges glowing.
Courtney Druz is the author of four books of poetry, including The Hannah Senesh Set and The Light and the Light. She has worked in architecture and graphic design, and her poems have appeared in a variety of journals. She lives in Israel.
